Policymakers

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has sat dormant for more than seven months under President Donald Trump — but the Administration says it’ll staff up and resume its work soon.

Chartered in its modern form in 2000, PCAST long has operated as the White House’s main interface with academics, industry experts and others who can help shape the government’s approach on a wide array of complex, cutting-edge issues. Under President Trump, though, there’s no one on the council. It’s one of many science-and-tech advisory arms at the White House that’s still severely depleted in staff, a series of vacancies made all the more striking by the president’s previous push to cut federal research spending. In the meantime, PCAST’s charter, technically, is set to run out: Obama’s executive order authorizing the council expires at the end of September. Apparently, President Trump is on track to sign his own executive order re-establishing PCAST in September. The process of staffing it will then fall to the leader of the White House’s other research team, the Office of Science and Technology Policy. But that office, known as OSTP, still has no director, and the President has offered no timeline for when he’ll nominate someone for the job. Even then, filling the ranks of PCAST might prove especially difficult in the coming months.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has made two appointments to the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC). First, Chairman Pai has appointed BDAC member Elizabeth Bowles to serve as Chair of the BDAC. Bowles is President and Chairman of the Board of Aristotle, Inc., an Arkansas-based wireless Internet service provider. In addition, the Chairman has appointed Larry Hanson, a member of the BDAC’s Model Code for Municipalities working group, to serve on the BDAC. Hanson represents the City of Valdosta (GA) where he is city manager.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai hereby appoints six additional members to the Consumer Advisory Committee for a term beginning September 1, 2017, and ending October 21, 2018, or, when the Committee terminates, whichever is earlier:
Consumer Technology Association – Julie Kearney (primary representative)
Digital Policy Institute – Barry Umansky (primary representative)
Kyle J. Hildebrand – (serving individually as a subject-matter expert, Special Government Employee)
T-Mobile – Luisa Lancetti (primary representative)
William Rinehart – (serving individually as a subject-matter expert, Special Government Employee)
Wireless Internet Service Providers Association – Alex Phillips (primary representative)

[Commentary] Neither Google, nor Eric Schmidt, told New America to fire Barry Lynn or his colleagues. They did not have to. Academics fill an intellectual gap that regulators often don’t have time to fill themselves. They supply the knowledge that politicians either don’t possess, or have no time to ponder. Whether it’s because the whole system is increasingly marketised and reliant on corporate funding, or just that big corporates have switched on to this as a way to pursue their agenda, the pressure on experts to alter their testimony to serve the interests of business is only going to increase.

Silicon Valley is subtler, too. If you control the research that happens, you change the entire tack of the conversation. Furthermore, you change the perception of reality itself. If the academics arguing that modern platform monopolies cause damage to the competitive landscape are drowned out by hundreds more funded by technology firms arguing that everything is fine, they look like a lunatic fringe no matter how strong their arguments.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has obtained a letter that President Donald Trump and a top political aide drafted in the days before President Trump fired the FBI director, James B. Comey, which explains the president’s rationale for why he planned to dismiss the director. The May letter had been met with opposition from Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, who believed that some of its contents were problematic, apparently.

McGahn successfully blocked the president from sending Comey the letter, which President Trump had composed with Stephen Miller, one of the president’s top political advisers. A different letter, written by the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, and focused on Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, was ultimately sent to the FBI director on the day he was fired.The contents of the original letter appear to provide the clearest rationale that President Trump had for firing Comey. The Times has not seen a copy of the letter and it is unclear how much of President Trump’s rationale focuses on the Russia investigation.

President Donald Trump seized on a letter from two Republican senators claiming evidence that FBI Director James Comey cleared former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing over her private e-mail server before concluding his investigation. In a message on Twitter, President Trump said it looked like Comey had "exonerated" Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, before the investigation was over. “Wow, looks like James Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton long before the investigation was over...and so much more. A rigged system!” he tweeted.

[Commentary] The think-tank world has come to be dominated by a distinctly modern kind of doublethink, which combines a rational understanding that corporations spend money to influence public policy with an instinctual belief that some of the institutions that benefit from it–often those that employ the thinker or his friends–function with complete independence. The New America Foundation runs several programs, including the Open Technology Institute , which researches issues that affect Google directly. The scholars who work on those projects don’t think of themselves as Google shills, and it’s hard to believe that they significantly changed their opinions in order to secure think-tank gigs. But it’s also hard to believe that their research isn’t affected by the funding that allows them to do the work they do.

Which leads us to the other big problem in the think-tank world–how the presence of so much corporate money distorts what work gets funded in the first place.

[Robert Levine is an author and journalist who writes about the media and technology businesses]

With so many Googlers in government, Google had an outsized influence on policymaking during the Obama years. But today, Google is in a different situation.

Most obviously, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt worked hard to get Hillary Clinton elected president, and Clinton lost. The issues don't end there. Given Silicon Valley's liberal views on social issues and Schmidt's love for Democratic politicians, it was probably inevitable that conservatives would sour on the search giant. But the larger problem for the search giant is that the company has been losing support among Democrats as well. A growing number of liberal thinkers believes that the concentration of corporate power was a major problem in the American economy. And few companies exemplify that concentration more than Google.

William Bradford, the man President Donald Trump has appointed to head an office under the Department of Energy, has blamed "cyber attacks and Internet crimes" for derogatory comments made against former President Barack Obama by an online user appearing to be Bradford. "I cannot comment on an ongoing federal investigation into multiple cyber attacks and Internet crimes committed against me over the past several years, to include e-mail intrusions, hacking and impostors in social media,” Bradford said. His statement comes after CNN’s KFile unearthed various comments from a user appearing to be Bradford on the comment-hosting platform Disqus. CNN’s research connected the account to Bradford via Google cache.

A federal judge on Aug 29 dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin against The New York Times, saying Palin’s complaint failed to show that a mistake in an editorial was made maliciously. “What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Palin that are very rapidly corrected,” Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan said in his ruling. “Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.”